What makes a Good Life ?Lessons from the longest study on happiness

and watched more than 8 million times ! Some people DO seek happiness !

What keeps us happy and healthy as we go through life? If you think it’s fame and money, you’re not alone – but, according to psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, you’re mistaken. As the director of a 75-year-old study on adult development, Waldinger has unprecedented access to data on true happiness and satisfaction. In this talk, he shares three important lessons learned from the study as well as some practical, old-as-the-hills wisdom on how to build a fulfilling, long life.

Here is the video at Youtube, followed by the transcript ….

And here is the FULL Transcript – read, apply !

00:11 What keeps us healthy and happyas we go through life?If you were going to invest nowin your future best self,where would you put your time and your energy?There was a recent survey of millennialsasking them what their most important life goals were,and over 80 percent saidthat a major life goal for them was to get rich.And another 50 percent of those same young adultssaid that another major life goalwas to become famous.

00:49 (Laughter)

00:51 And we’re constantly told to lean in to work, to push harderand achieve more.We’re given the impression that these are the things that we need to go afterin order to have a good life.Pictures of entire lives,of the choices that people make and how those choices work out for them,those pictures are almost impossible to get.Most of what we know about human lifewe know from asking people to remember the past,and as we know, hindsight is anything but 20/20.We forget vast amounts of what happens to us in life,and sometimes memory is downright creative.

01:35 But what if we could watch entire livesas they unfold through time?What if we could study people from the time that they were teenagersall the way into old ageto see what really keeps people happy and healthy?

01:54 We did that.The Harvard Study of Adult Developmentmay be the longest study of adult life that’s ever been done.For 75 years, we’ve tracked the lives of 724 men,year after year, asking about their work, their home lives, their health,and of course asking all along the way without knowing how their life storieswere going to turn out.

02:24 Studies like this are exceedingly rare.Almost all projects of this kind fall apart within a decadebecause too many people drop out of the study,or funding for the research dries up,or the researchers get distracted,or they die, and nobody moves the ball further down the field.But through a combination of luckand the persistence of several generations of researchers,this study has survived.About 60 of our original 724 menare still alive,still participating in the study,most of them in their 90s.And we are now beginning to studythe more than 2,000 children of these men.And I’m the fourth director of the study.

03:14 Since 1938, we’ve tracked the lives of two groups of men.The first group started in the studywhen they were sophomores at Harvard College.They all finished college during World War II,and then most went off to serve in the war.And the second group that we’ve followedwas a group of boys from Boston’s poorest neighborhoods,boys who were chosen for the studyspecifically because they were from some of the most troubledand disadvantaged familiesin the Boston of the 1930s.Most lived in tenements, many without hot and cold running water.

03:53 When they entered the study,all of these teenagers were interviewed.They were given medical exams.We went to their homes and we interviewed their parents.And then these teenagers grew up into adultswho entered all walks of life.They became factory workers and lawyers and bricklayers and doctors,one President of the United States.Some developed alcoholism. A few developed schizophrenia.Some climbed the social ladderfrom the bottom all the way to the very top,and some made that journey in the opposite direction.

04:34 The founders of this studywould never in their wildest dreamshave imagined that I would be standing here today, 75 years later,telling you that the study still continues.Every two years, our patient and dedicated research staffcalls up our men and asks them if we can send themyet one more set of questions about their lives.

04:59 Many of the inner city Boston men ask us,“Why do you keep wanting to study me? My life just isn’t that interesting.”The Harvard men never ask that question.

05:10 (Laughter)

05:19 To get the clearest picture of these lives,we don’t just send them questionnaires.We interview them in their living rooms.We get their medical records from their doctors.We draw their blood, we scan their brains,we talk to their children.We videotape them talking with their wives about their deepest concerns.And when, about a decade ago, we finally asked the wivesif they would join us as members of the study,many of the women said, “You know, it’s about time.”

05:49 (Laughter)

05:50 So what have we learned?What are the lessons that come from the tens of thousands of pagesof information that we’ve generatedon these lives?Well, the lessons aren’t about wealth or fame or working harder and harder.The clearest message that we get from this 75-year study is this:Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.

06:22 We’ve learned three big lessons about relationships.The first is that social connections are really good for us,and that loneliness kills.It turns out that people who are more socially connectedto family, to friends, to community,are happier, they’re physically healthier, and they live longerthan people who are less well connected.And the experience of loneliness turns out to be toxic.People who are more isolated than they want to be from othersfind that they are less happy,their health declines earlier in midlife,their brain functioning declines soonerand they live shorter lives than people who are not lonely.And the sad fact is that at any given time,more than one in five Americans will report that they’re lonely.

07:18 And we know that you can be lonely in a crowdand you can be lonely in a marriage,so the second big lesson that we learnedis that it’s not just the number of friends you have,and it’s not whether or not you’re in a committed relationship,but it’s the quality of your close relationships that matters.It turns out that living in the midst of conflict is really bad for our health.High-conflict marriages, for example, without much affection,turn out to be very bad for our health, perhaps worse than getting divorced.And living in the midst of good, warm relationships is protective.

07:56 Once we had followed our men all the way into their 80s,we wanted to look back at them at midlifeand to see if we could predictwho was going to grow into a happy, healthy octogenarianand who wasn’t.And when we gathered together everything we knew about themat age 50,it wasn’t their middle age cholesterol levelsthat predicted how they were going to grow old.It was how satisfied they were in their relationships.The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50were the healthiest at age 80.And good, close relationships seem to buffer usfrom some of the slings and arrows of getting old.Our most happily partnered men and womenreported, in their 80s,that on the days when they had more physical pain,their mood stayed just as happy.But the people who were in unhappy relationships,on the days when they reported more physical pain,it was magnified by more emotional pain.

09:03 And the third big lesson that we learned about relationships and our healthis that good relationships don’t just protect our bodies,they protect our brains.It turns out that being in a securely attached relationshipto another person in your 80s is protective,that the people who are in relationshipswhere they really feel they can count on the other person in times of need,those people’s memories stay sharper longer.And the people in relationshipswhere they feel they really can’t count on the other one,those are the people who experience earlier memory decline.And those good relationships, they don’t have to be smooth all the time.Some of our octogenarian couples could bicker with each otherday in and day out,but as long as they felt that they could really count on the otherwhen the going got tough,those arguments didn’t take a toll on their memories.

10:00 So this message,that good, close relationships are good for our health and well-being,this is wisdom that’s as old as the hills.Why is this so hard to get and so easy to ignore?Well, we’re human.What we’d really like is a quick fix,something we can getthat’ll make our lives good and keep them that way.Relationships are messy and they’re complicatedand the hard work of tending to family and friends,it’s not sexy or glamorous.It’s also lifelong. It never ends.The people in our 75-year study who were the happiest in retirementwere the people who had actively worked to replace workmates with new playmates.Just like the millennials in that recent survey,many of our men when they were starting out as young adultsreally believed that fame and wealth and high achievementwere what they needed to go after to have a good life.But over and over, over these 75 years, our study has shownthat the people who fared the best were the people who leaned in to relationships,with family, with friends, with community.

11:20 So what about you?Let’s say you’re 25, or you’re 40, or you’re 60.What might leaning in to relationships even look like?

11:30 Well, the possibilities are practically endless.It might be something as simple as replacing screen time with people timeor livening up a stale relationship by doing something new together,long walks or date nights,or reaching out to that family member who you haven’t spoken to in years,because those all-too-common family feudstake a terrible tollon the people who hold the grudges.

12:03 I’d like to close with a quote from Mark Twain.More than a century ago,he was looking back on his life,and he wrote this:“There isn’t time, so brief is life,for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account.There is only time for loving,and but an instant, so to speak, for that.”